This article originally appeared on Forbes
Personalization in telco is known as a good way to differentiate for less churn. ISPs personalize services for marketing to increase average revenue per unit (ARPU). According to BCG, telcos that invest in hyper-personalization increase the value of their customer portfolios by 35%. Yet its implementation isn’t simple to get right. In the connected home, quality of experience (QoE) is even more challenging with all the variety of connected devices, apps and services, so personalization takes on an even greater role for success.
As with telco personalization, personalized medicine is based on personal data and analytics to help both individuals and the system get better results and improve quality. Personal data is helping to save lives and lower time and costs in healthcare. By using similar principles in the connected home, ISPs can gain insights from parallel experiences.
Let’s understand more about personalized medicine and how it can help telcos advance with the right data and visibility in the connected home.
Three Lessons Learned From Personalized Medicine For Telco Success
Personalized medicine tailors medical treatment to the individual characteristics and requirements of each patient. Here’s how it can help telcos:
1. Manage customer-specific data for new solutions. In personalized medicine, new patient-specific data helps avoid aggressive diseases by understanding how a person’s unique genetic profile makes them susceptible to certain diseases. Just as doctors help patients stop carcinogenesis with new data, the same can be true for telcos. Instead of biomarkers to determine specific actions and precautions for prevention, telcos can use subscribers’ internet consumption data to improve QoE and troubleshooting.
2. Detect problems early with new data. By personalizing testing at both the clinical and molecular levels, new health data leads to breakthroughs in patient care. With patient-specific genetic and clinical data, monitoring of unique vulnerabilities is possible for disease events specifically related to a person’s unique profile to detect disease earlier in development. Similar success with AI-based analysis in NG telcos can be achieved.
3. Predict with more visibility. Visibility of critical new data helps in decision-making for the best medical treatment — based on what’s best, safe and effective for each patient and which treatments aren’t compatible. Telcos can improve their subscribers’ QoE with a similar approach to visibility into the connected home, enabling contextual diagnosis and personalized treatment.
With the right data, AI-based analysis and visibility tools, ISPs can get the benefits they seek from hyper-personalization.
Adding Contextual Diagnosis Like Medicine For QoE
With contextual diagnosis, telcos can use the connected home data more powerfully as seen in the personalized medicine experience. As in healthcare, individual differences in the plurality of genomes provided new insights for personalized testing, diagnosis and treatment of our multiple systems at many levels. With the growing number of devices, applications and complexity in the connected home, telcos can deal with troubleshooting and customer care in a similar manner. Just like modern medicine recognized the impact of individual context, the NG telco industry must handle customers in a similar context-sensitive manner to improve QoE.
Becoming More Proactive With Data For ARPU
With personalization, healthcare is proactive rather than reactive. There’s less drug toxicity, trial-and-error, severe side effects and misdiagnosis with more efficiency and better outcomes. The lessons learned directly apply to telcos to boost sales.
Here are two examples for generating ARPU:
1. Using customer profiles for a marketing advantage. With a context-specific device, app and usage information, not only do ISPs see and suggest improvements for QoE, but they can also offer a better home-based package. If the customer WFH and works far from the router, the ISP can suggest a mesh extender for those working far from the router. For streamers using Netflix at the end of their bandwidth, the ISP can offer an upgrade to help in real time.
2. Using search to upsell. If a customer profile shows no Wi-Fi booster and they are looking at Wi-Fi options, an ISP can suggest content on the right Wi-Fi booster to match their specific home environment.
With the right segmentation tools, ISPs generate a personalized home connectivity experience for customers. It’s the best way for telcos to differentiate their offering and services for satisfied customers. By segmenting by data, connectivity and usage demands in real time, ISPs get the visibility they need for connected home success.
Meeting NG Connected Home Needs For Effective Telco Personalization
Like in personalized medicine, telcos can improve QoE at every touchpoint with the right information. With millions of data points every day, telcos gather mass quantities of valuable customer data from usage habits to likely upgrade services to unique habits and interests. Yet many are missing out on the opportunity to boost revenues and reduce churn with customer loyalty.
For smart, effective personalization, telcos need the right context-sensitive tools and AI-based analysis for understanding apps, devices and services with full, real-time visibility into the network. Whether for growing the ISP customer base, retaining existing users or improving customer service, effective personalization must be a top priority in the next era of the connected home for better QoE and higher ARPU.
